


Honor Guard

by Lassarina



Category: Final Fantasy X
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-04-11 02:28:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4417496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lassarina/pseuds/Lassarina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aeons, too, grieve their summoner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honor Guard

As Lady Yocun takes each slow step, her breath heaving in the thin air near the peak of Mount Gagazet, her aeons hover around her, invisible and insubstantial, awaiting her call. Rather, their consciousness does, as it resides with each summoner who has won their respect. This is the power that their statues permit them to channel: the ability to follow the summoners on currents of pyreflies, and draw those pyreflies together into their chosen shape when they are called.

Lady Yocun falls, and Valefor cringes. Her guardian helps her to her feet and gives her one of their precious stock of potions, dwindled now as they approach the summit. She takes another step, and another, and the fiends gather, sensing weakness. Lady Yocun calls, and Valefor seizes a clutch of pyreflies and bursts into physical existence. She wings up nimbly out of the way of the Bashura that takes a swing at her and claws its face in return, then nips at the other to drain it and slow it down. She has neither Ifrit’s raw strength nor Ixion's sturdiness, so she must be quick instead. When the fiends collapse into pyreflies, she too dissolves, and Lady Yocun clutches her staff and takes another slow step.

The moment when a summoner faces Lady Yunalesca is always balanced on a knife-edge of despair, terror, and hope, for the aeons know the secret that the summoners do not. Lady Yunalesca's solution is no cure, but merely a temporary relief. If she still breathed, Valefor would hold her breath as Lady Yunalesca offers her reprieve. She has seen summoners accept, and she has seen summoners rebel, and she has seen all of them fall. She is truly not sure which one is the worst.

Lady Yocun chooses temporary reprieve. Valefor hears Ixion's deep groan and Ifrit's snarl, Shiva's hoarse cry and Bahamut's growl, her own sob. Lady Yocun and her guardian embrace while Lady Yunalesca's icy touch transforms her, and then, glowing with the inner fire of the Final Aeon, Lady Yocun turns to go.

She begins to make her way down the mountain, and the aeons follow, coalescing unbidden from the rich mass of pyreflies that thickens the air of Lady Yunalesca's sanctuary. Their honor guard resembles a funeral procession, marching in sober time to the beat of Lady Yocun's heart and the pulse of her guardian's spirit, singing the Hymn in five-part harmony as they go. Lady Yocun's skin grows paler, and her aura brighter, with each step, as more of her strength goes to sustain the Final Aeon until the moment of confrontation. They press close to protect her, to support her. When her legs falter, Ixion kneels, that she might climb onto his back. Shiva walks beside, holding her steady. Ifrit forges ahead, melting the snow that might make for poor footing. Bahamut paces behind, ready to slay anything that might approach her, though nothing does. Valefor soars overhead, searching for threats, but finds none.

The dazzle of the Final Aeon is visible for miles; the Ronso assemble to bow to the summoner as she passes them once more. In the Calm Lands, those who live there have fled with their most valued possessions, trying to outpace the destruction of this battle. Valefor sees them race, on foot or on chocobo, to the shelter of the encircling mountains or the sanctuary of Macalania Woods.

Sin looms over the Calm Lands. It has been over a century since the last Calm. Valefor wonders if the Final Aeon grows as weary as she has, as her brothers and sisters have. She has never had the chance to ask; by the time the question would matter, Sin is beyond answering.

Lady Yocun slides from Ixion's back and shakes off Shiva's steadying hand. She staggers more than walks, but forward she goes, and her honor guard clusters together for comfort. Valefor cannot bear to watch, not again, but she owes her summoner this much, and so she watches.

The clash between Sin and the Final Aeon takes mere moments, an explosion of searing light that shreds their pyrefly bodies and digs new scars into the Calm Lands, but it seems to take forever. In the midst of the pain, Lady Yocun calls out to them, one last time; a whisper of thanks before she is gone forever.

Valefor withdraws into her statue, grateful that the celebrations of a new Calm mean that she will have time to grieve, to remember Lady Yocun's smiles and her guardian's wry jokes, before another summoner asks her to guide him to his death. Stone does not weep, nor do fayth, but that does not mean she does not feel. She does not call out to her siblings, not yet. This wound is too new.

She cannot even bring herself to sing the Hymn for comfort, not now. Outside her temple, the people of Spira laugh and sing, freed of their grief for a while because of Lady Yocun's sacrifice, and her guardian's, and Valefor's, and all the fayth.

The people of Spira know not what they demand from their summoners in exchange for peace.

For a moment she wishes she could refuse her role, relinquish this statue and let herself dissolve into the dream of a world without Sin. She could deny the summoners who come to her, and coax her siblings to do the same. They could stop this cycle.

"That would not stop Sin," she can almost hear Lady Yocun say. "Is my life so high a price to pay, for even a temporary peace? I do not think so."

But Lady Yocun does not know the grief she leaves behind; Lady Yocun is beyond such things. Always it is easier to die than to live. The summoner needs only that moment of bravery, that instant of determination, and then all is taken from her. It is her aeons--Valefor and her siblings, and the Final Aeon most of all--who bear Spira's burden.

The anger surges at last, and Valefor keens to the uncaring sky, where she knows Yu Yevon floats disembodied, waiting to gather enough pyreflies to form his summoning anew. She hears the cries of her siblings, united in their grief, and she shouts her fury and her grief and her fear that there will never be a summoner who dares to live for Spira, not die for it. She fears, deeply, that she will guard dozens more summoners, until the grief drives her mad and she shatters her temple and joins with Sin, to revenge herself upon this world that cares so little for its saviors.

The dirge rises, and the fury, and the grief. No glorious harmony, this, but a clashing dissonance that the people cannot hear, immersed as they are in their own joy.

The dirge fades, and Valefor with it, sinking into her statue and turning inward. In place of her grief there is a hollow emptiness, an exhaustion so profound she thinks she might expire from it (but she cannot, for such are the magics woven into her statue, the nature of the oaths she made when she became a fayth). She is trapped, as surely as the summoners and the Final Aeons and even Yu Yevon and Yunalesca themselves, spiraling endlessly.

Valefor sleeps, and waits for the next summoner who will call upon her, for this is the oath she made: ever honor guard, ever doomed.


End file.
